Numerous tanker cars pass through and are parked in Fort Collins daily, many of them carrying crude oil. A tanker car wearing a red diamond-shaped hazmat placard is pictured while parked along Vine Drive Thursday in northeast Fort Collins. / Rich Abrahamson/The Coloradoan

Written by

Bobby Magill

Train Hazmat 101

You can get an idea what kind of hazardous material a train tanker car is carrying by looking at the diamond-shaped hazmat placard posted on the car. Each placard carries a “UN Number,” a code designated by the United Nations identifying the kind of hazardous material being transported. Common hazardous materials on trains in Fort Collins and their UN Numbers:

These are only a few of the most common hazardous materials — many corrosive or explosive — that trains carrythrough downtown Fort Collins every day.

Two trains carrying dozens of tanker cars filled with crude oil parked briefly on the railroad tracks paralleling Riverside Avenue on Friday afternoon, each brimming with the same kind of flammable oil that filled train cars that derailed and exploded in Quebec last weekend.

That train disaster, caused by an engineer failing to properly set the train’s breaks before it careened down a 7-mile hill, destroyed part of the town of Lac-Megantic, Quebec, Canada, near the Maine border. The accident is believed to have killed 50 people who were so severely burned that by Friday coroners were only able to make one positive identification, according to the Associated Press.

With freight trains carrying hazardous materials through Fort Collins every day, what are the chances a train derailment could spark an explosive disaster here?

The chances are probably slim, but the possibility exists, said Dick Spiess, coordinator for hazardous materials teams for Poudre Fire Authority.

The statistics show why: Major fatal derailments are rare, with 14 deaths attributed to train derailment-related hazardous materials accidents between 2003 and 2012, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

Derailments alone are more common, however. Federal Railroad Administration data show there were 27 train derailments in Colorado in 2012 and four so far in 2013. Nationwide, there were 1,272 derailments in 2012 and 385 so far this year, while train accidents of all kinds accounted for nine fatalities in 2012 and none so far this year.

There were 35 crude oil spills of more than five gallons involving freight trains in the U.S. between 2002 and 2012, according to the American Association or Railroads.

“Railroads remain the safest way to transport hazardous materials, reducing accidents by 91 percent since 1980 due to industry investment and operating practices,” BNSF Railway spokesman Andy Williams said. “BNSF is continuously assessing and improving its own operations to prevent incidents in the first place.”

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Railroads keep their trains at slower speeds in urban areas and have invested heavily in railroad crossing upgrades that help prevent cars and trucks from derailing trains, Spiess said.

“Any high school kid text messaging his girlfriend could derail a train,” he said. “If they should have the unfortunate event where they have a derailment, it’s less likely to be at speeds significant enough to cause damage to the containers. Liquid petroleum gas — you get (a tanker car) going 40 to 50 mph, and you tip it over, that’s a whole other story.”

Railroads have assisted Front Range first responders in training for train-related hazmat disasters and even re-route some of the most hazardous chemicals, such as chlorine, away from areas of high population density, said Fort Collins Emergency Manager Mike Gavin.

Chlorine and other extremely hazardous materials that find their way on to a train passing into Fort Collins are often delivered to local businesses, he said.

First responders train for small train accidents involving hazardous materials, but not for catastrophic derailments like the Quebec disaster, Spiess said.

“When you have something on the scope of what happened in Canada, you know that all went very bad very quickly, and there’s no way to have enough firefighters and resources available to handle something of that scale so very, very quickly,” he said. “You just can’t have that many people sitting around for the potential of maybe someday we might have a train wreck.”

Explosives and corrosives

But if safety measures fail and a catastrophic accident occurs, what kind of chemicals will first responders be dealing with?

“Flammable liquids, flammable gas, liquefied petroleum gas, combustibles — sulfur is a big one that comes through town,” Spiess said. “There’s an awful lot of gasoline, diesel, that sort of material, or crude that gets transported by rail.”

Required hazmat placards on individual train cars inform first responders of the kind of chemical they’d be dealing with and its volatility. But little data is available about how often specific chemicals are transported along railroads through Fort Collins.

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Williams said BNSF, which operates the line running down Mason Street, doesn’t reveal hazmat routes and specific carload data for safety and security reasons.

Federal Railroad Administration spokesman Kevin Thompson said railroads, upon written request, provide local first responders with a list of the top 25 hazardous commodities transported through their community for any given year.

The U.S. Department of Transportation requires railroad tank cars to have a placard posted on the car stating both the identity of the hazardous material contained inside and whether it is flammable, explosive, a poison gas, corrosive, radioactive or otherwise dangerous.

“We can look at the container and tell if it’s high pressure, low pressure, flammable, acid,” Gavin said. “We don’t need to know the exact product as long as we know (the kind of material contained in the tanker car).”

Explosive or corrosive material moving down a railroad track is hardly the most significant hazmat concern first responders worry about, he said.

“We’re as much concerned with what’s stored in our community and what’s going up (U.S. Highway 287) as with what’s on the railroad,” Gavin said. “We do exercises on large-scale mass casualty (accidents). Your response is virtually the same. The location, the amount of product is what’s different.”